


crude and proud creatures

by whatitis



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Current Bastardry, M/M, MAG 92, Past Relationships, Pre-Victorian Repression, jonah is a lil bastard. but a sad lil bastard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22746544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatitis/pseuds/whatitis
Summary: “The moment Jonah crosses the threshold, he knows he has made a mistake.”•An exploration of episode 92, Nothing Beside Remains, and how Jonah Magnus retrieved the bones of his friend.
Relationships: Jonah Magnus/Barnabas Bennett, Jonah Magnus/Mordechai Lukas (One-Sided Relationship)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 65





	crude and proud creatures

Jonah Magnus wakes up on a clear morning in the middle of November, and he knows Barnabas Bennett is dead.

He sees it, really: in his mind’s eye, in his Eye’s mind, a presence ever-present that is no longer there. Not gone, either. He felt Barnabas leaving the world proper long before he found the letter that he subsequently ignored, and the small notes of desperation that followed—a shifted chair here, a trail of fingerprints in dust there, all over the Institute like a million pieces of a grand puzzle that Jonah already has seen the complete version of. He saw Barnabas in that peculiar absence, but it was different enough to be noticeable. Like viewing someone through thick panes of glass frosted with cold fog. It wasn’t good watching, but he watched regardless.

And now the shadow beyond the winter window is gone, and Jonah knows surely as anything that the beast that took him tired of the enrichment and drained dearest Barnabas of his loneliness. On a conscious level, he’s sure he should grieve for the loss of a beloved companion, but his true nature—the nature that left Barnabas to die in the first place instead of intervening—knows that the sadness that swells in his heart isn’t born of solitary mourning. 

What a waste of an experimental subject!

Even as the letters went ignored, and the man’s cries for help fell on willfully deaf ears, Jonah examined them rigorously, trying to study the power that so fiercely resents being seen. After years of research with Smirke, the Forsaken One, that Lonely being—it has proved to be most evasive. It leaves no witnesses to behold it, and no tracks with which to follow it. Its servant is deliberately difficult to get a hold of, something Jonah finds rather irritating even now, as he finally makes his intervening move too late to make a real difference.

He’ll pass it off that way, anyways, feigning sadness and guilt at only “just now” realizing what had happened, as if there were no letters or helpful Watcher guiding his steps. Mordechai isn’t a stupid man by any means, but he is simple, and Jonah intends to use that precise sort of single-mindedness to his advantage. Force a confrontation. Even before becoming a devotee to bitter, absent emptiness, the man was particularly quiet and anti-social, preferring to take to silence at gatherings of their little circle. Finding him on purpose is proving to be a challenge in and of itself, though, and Jonah regrets being so blasé about using his abilities to find Mordechai.

The Lukas estate is predictably enormous, and only seems to grow with each visit to its brooding moors and harsh iron gates finely separating from the rest of the world. Jonah is greeted as he steps out of his carriage by a harrowed-looking woman, someone of little consequence that seems to vanish as soon as she directs him to sit in the parlor and wait for Lukas himself to deign to meet his uninvited guest. The house itself is silent as the grave: there are no drafts that shake the windows in their frames, and nothing creaks the floorboards, not even Jonah’s own steps as he crosses the room to a stately armchair to sit. Perfect quiet, the thinks. Even his thoughts seem to be muted, like footsteps in deep snow.

Jonah politely waits for perhaps five minutes before determining nobody is really around to punish him for straying from the host’s orders. He’s certain Mordechai is never going to come, and is either expecting Jonah to leave him alone or find him himself, and while this whole venture seems to be absurd and a waste of his time, Jonah has a coffin in his carriage that he doesn’t intend to leave empty. After that small period of unbroken silence, alone and waiting, he stands up again, stretching lithely with the motion, and he searches.

It’s all through his patron, at first. So far, it’s been rather clumsy going, but he’s able to tell who and when people will knock at his office door, and see the vaguest shapes of their thoughts. Sometimes, he is given ideas or facts seemingly at random: perhaps his tailor’s mother died of fever in 1801, or that Smirke’s favorite time of day is a delightfully balanced noon. Even so, even knowing that he might not be able to _know,_ he’s certain that the emptiness he feels when he reaches for the location of Mordechai Lukas is not due to his own lack of ability. It’s different, somehow. Instead of feeling drained and ill as he might when trying to overstep his power, he simply feels...nothing, nothing at all, like a dream that never took place.

Barring that, Jonah has two working eyes and two working legs, and so he sets out through the cavernous, cold rooms of the grand manor, eyes carefully focused on every minute detail. Something tells him that even if Lukas doesn’t want to talk ( _never_ wants to talk), he won’t hide away. They’re on good terms, Jonah and Mordechai. Not quite friends, and yet somehow more—yes, Jonah is quite sure that he’ll be able to find the man with his own eyes, even if he’s hidden from the more spiritual force at play. It’s merely an issue of impetuous pride that will surely be stamped out one of these days, when the rituals are fully thought out and completed. Something like the Forsaken’s form of godliness cannot live in a world ruled by Knowing, so Jonah allows him his fun in the present. It won’t make a difference, even if it is irritating.

After several floors of doors that lead to sterile, empty rooms, Jonah finally stumbles upon the master study, and is almost surprised to see it inhabited. Behind a greenish door with a brassy knob is a dim space, devoid of dust because dust is indicative of something, anything being there, and this is not a room for something or anything. It is a room for the man at the window, silhouetted by the misty afternoon light, large yet unimposing, a pipe jutting out of the corner of his mouth like a permanent fixture of his craggy face. The moment Jonah crosses the threshold, he knows he has made a mistake by intruding on the den of some proud, lonely creature, and something like fear stirs in him. Jonah Magnus is a stranger to fear, but he wasn’t always, and even the ghost of it unsettles him.

“Mordechai,” he says in greeting, gently shutting the door behind him in a way reminiscent of a crypt’s stone sliding into place. It doesn’t help that the room is deathly cold. Jonah tightens his coat around his shoulders: so _this_ is the place dear Barnabas was condemned to. Just enough like the real world to be passable, but the corners of the room are fuzzy when he tries to look at them, and the dread of it all settles in his stomach. His host doesn’t respond, merely looking out over the foggy expanse of his estate with a distance to him, as if the room is a mile wide.

“Mordechai,” Jonah repeats firmly. “I’ve come to talk to you.”

“Talk to me?” Mordechai Lukas finally turns to face Jonah, and the visitor is struck by his intense pallor, corpselike in his grandeur. “That’s rather kind of you, Mr. Magnus. We don’t receive visitors often.”

“I would ask you call me Jonah. We’ve hardly been companions long enough to remain on such a...distant manner of addresses.” Jonah swallows dryly, having forgotten how precisely uncanny every conversation with Lukas is prone to be. “Yes, I’m here to talk. May we sit?”

Mordechai considers the proposition for so long that Jonah is genuinely fearful that he may have interpreted it as a genuine yes-or-no question instead of the gently railroading request that it was, but he does eventually nod, gesturing vaguely at the desk near the back of the room, two chairs on either side that were perhaps once ornate but had been worn down by time to be featureless and simple. The instruction is wordless, but enough for Jonah to follow gratefully, sitting down with a stillness that seems to be endemic to the room. He’s almost certain his heartbeat is audible, in the same way that he’s certain Mordechai’s isn’t.

“What do you need, Jonah?” he asks softly, like he doesn’t know. For all his appearances, his eyes are bright and healthy, and Jonah is certain the life of Barnabas Bennett sustains them. He carefully controls the resentment in his response, forcing it into the shape of pleasant business.

“It has been brought to my attention the whereabouts of our friend Barnabas,” he says mildly, examining his nails in an obvious diversion from looking at Lukas. His gaze tends to be a threat, and he’d really like to get this over with without getting rid of his connection to the Lukas estate and, more importantly, the Lukas estate’s generosity to his cause. Mordechai only snorts out a laugh at the gesture, low and amused. _Insufferable dandy,_ Jonah hears, as clear as if it were actually said, but Mordechai rarely actually says anything.

And he doesn’t now, merely looking at Jonah levelly with a question in his stare that never makes it past his lips: _and what about it?_

“If there’s anything remaining of him,” Jonah continues, knowing full well that there surely is, “I would like to retrieve it. It wouldn’t do to leave our dear friend without burial, would it, Mordechai?”

“He wasn’t part of the Burial.” Jonah laughs idly, more out of a polite need to fill the hole in the conversation than actually thinking that was an amusing quip. 

“No, he wasn’t. Had you not seen fit to have him as a Sunday supper, he would have made a fine servant of the Eye.” Jonah smiles serenely. “But we still bury our own. One of life’s little sacrileges.”

“Might’ve been good Forsaken.” 

“And yet.”

“And _yet._ ” Mordechai yawns with such effort that the gesture seems to be physical labor for him, crossing his arms over his chest. “Men like us must eat. And I believe the both of us ate well off of Mr. Bennett.” Jonah laughs incredulously.

“I beg your pardon?” His voice is icy when he does reply, with just as much propensity for shattering as the real thing.

“God damns a liar, Jonah. Especially yours.”

“I beg your pardon!”

“We both know well that you could’ve interfered sooner. I can feel your eyes on me, I’d like you to know.” Mordechai Lukas’ anger is slow and quiet, like a riptide underneath a placid, impassive surface. “Watching him. Watching _me._ ”

Jonah senses a noise like a sharp, soft whistle more than he hears it, experiencing the sensation as a tingle in his jaw, a slight distortion to Mordechai’s voice. Rapidly, the situation is falling out of his careful control.

“Men like us must eat,” he echoes, and his voice sounds distant even to himself. Mordechai chuckles.

“We’re not yet finished with him,” the man muses, letting his hands rest on the desk with all the finality of a corpse’s. “I have his bones.”

“Surely that’s enough to sate your hunger.”

“Bones bear marrow still, Jonah.”

Jonah feels a chill run down his spine, and he clasps his immaculate hands in his lap to steady a tremor. The weight of his namesake is heavy on his shoulders. He’s in too deep. Lukas is powerful, now: cocky in his abilities. Quiet as he may be, this is far from the easy confrontation he desired. Mordechai continues, seemingly unaware of or unbothered by Jonah’s stirring anxiety.

“I’d like to set a wager.” His voice is soft, _so_ soft, and words that Jonah normally would be able to lose in a crowded parlor filled with their contemporaries are impossible to ignore in the deep soundlessness of the conversation.

“By what means?” Jonah asks. The question is weaponized, with barbed edges and a dangerous power behind it. There’s no reason to try and compel it out of the man, but he needs to exert his ability somewhere before he loses his grasp on the negotiation entirely.

“Any game you please,” Mordechai answers mildly, spreading his hands to reveal a pair of dice. “Most any. I care not for something you can win simply by knowing how to play perfectly. Chance is preferable.”

“Of course.” Jonah takes a deep, steadying breath. “Hazard?”

“Acceptable enough,” Mordechai laughs. “You really do fancy your odds. If I lose thrice before you do, you may have your dear Barnabas’ bones.” Jonah tenses at the epithet. It’s mundane enough to be meaningless, but with a man of so few words as Mordechai, every word has to have meaning.

“And if I happen to lose?”

“You owe me a debt.”

“Absolutely not.” Jonah is close to spitting out the words, making a move to stand up without actually committing to the action. “I know what happens to those that owe the Lukases. I hardly intend to count myself among their number.”

“Need you be so nervous?” Mordechai seems to genuinely wonder. “I simply want to use some of your resources. That _library._ As your benefactor...”

Jonah forces himself to relax, adjusting his collar slightly.

“If it pleases you,” he snaps. Mordechai hardly reacts to the tone, merely pushing the dice across the table without a word.

The game proceeds in much of the same way, not much between the pair of men except the dice between each run. It goes fairly enough: a win for Jonah here, a loss there, a win for Mordechai, a loss...it’s frustratingly even at two losses each with a handful of wins between them as Jonah once again gets his hands on the dice, forcing his fingers to still. Showing fear is tantamount to suicide in their circle: as is showing anything else. It would be far too suspicious if any of them openly practiced their devotions, even with it being an open secret. Approximating a “normal” reaction, between euphoric elation and purest dread, to the idea of surveillance is harder than one may think.

But the academic social scene is far away from Jonah now as he rolls the dice, calling for a five and nicking it neatly. He sighs in relief. His blessings are frustratingly useless in something like this, except to discern what the result will be after the pieces have already left his hand. It’s infuriating, but it is fair, and he realizes that this is likely the world that most people live in. Someone in his position rarely gets the perspective of an average person with no leg up in any given circumstance.

Mordechai takes the dice back, rolling them gently in his worn palm before casting them.

“Six,” he says, voice soft but firm.

At last, he throws out with a three. Jonah hopes his pleasure isn’t too obvious to the other man, but Mordechai seems relatively unbothered, merely blinking at Jonah with all the air of just waking up from a particularly fitful sleep.

“A most interesting meeting, Mordechai.” Jonah stands up, carefully straightening out his sleeves with a meticulous care. “I’d rather not repeat it. What of your end of the deal?”

“You are being _quite_ abrupt,” Mordechai replies hollowly, and Jonah sees in him a strange emptiness that he can’t quite mark as longing. Loneliness sits on the man as readily as any suit, and to see it is to see Mordechai Lukas himself, without any qualifiers. He can’t possibly be lonely, because he _is_ loneliness, but that does nothing to abate the need saturating his mind as he reaches across the desk to clasp Jonah’s hand.

“Mr. Lukas.” It’s a rebuttal, a warning, and Jonah steps out of reach with a suddenness that sends a visible pang of disappointment along Mordechai’s spine. Visible to the Eye, if nothing else. “You’ve fed your patron nicely. You’d do well not to spoil its mood.”

“Certainly.” The hollowness is more pronounced, now, bold-faced type with each thought. _I don’t care._

“The remains?” Jonah coolly pushes his chair in.

“In the back gardens. By the hydrangea. You can leave by the front gate again.” It’s clear to where he means to leave _from,_ unnamed as the place he inhabits may be. _Leave me alone._

Jonah regards him then, even as he heads back across the insurmountable distance between the desk and the door, casting one last long glance to the figure behind the desk. He still hasn’t bothered to get up, falling victim to that perpetual melancholy that pervades his being. The pipe is back in his mouth, and he stares at nothing in particular, not offering Jonah any farewell. The bridge may not be burnt, but it collapses as surely as any does over time, and Jonah worries little about it. He’s sure he will still receive funding, if only for his continued silence and absence. The threat of contact is likely enough to frighten Lukas into compliance. Embracing a fear tends to heighten the hatred of its natural opposite.

Jonah pads gently through the empty house and back into the cold autumnal air, tugging on his gloves and hat. It’s not the same outside he came in from, of _course_ not—the rusty redness to the clouds and the oppressive fog remind him of exactly where he is, and he can’t help but let his mind wander to Barnabas wandering through the bleakness, begging for mercy, praying to a God he never really believed in or the man keeping him trapped in the suffocating nothingness. Perhaps he prayed in supplication to Jonah Magnus. The thought makes him feel strangely breathless as he strides across the greens turned a sickly brown in the light, his feet coming to a stop at the famished hydrangea bush and the small pile of bones underneath, white and clean.

Jonah bends down carefully to touch them, and the memories he never had flood to him in a rush of adrenaline and serotonin.

He is himself, and he is younger, sitting on his desk with a haphazard holiness, instructing in carefully constructed hypotheticals how to worship a god that doesn’t exist, how exactly to pray and make sacrifices of story and memory, how greedily it feeds on the knowledge of truths unknown, the precise things it loves, how Jonah could bring it about into the world to rule it, to be better than it, to see all and to have all see, the joy of being known by something so truly and wonderfully, because the Ceaseless Watcher is true and wonderful, and Jonah will never, ever die, and

he is Himself, and he is Barnabas, being worshipped and worshipful, receiving and giving the praise befitting of the vessel of a god, the _right_ god, even though

he is Smirke, Robert Smirke, and he is being kept awake by nightmares of himself, of Jonah, as surely as the arm is kept awake by a twitching of the leg, an activity unauthorized and unwanted, desperately warning Barnabas of nothing in particular, because Jonah gets to change what information is allowed to pass between people, and

he is Barnabas again, Barnabas purely and alone, _so_ alone, separate from everything and anything, friendless by the illusion of choice and absent from the world with hardly anyone to notice, and he begs fervently at his rotten altar for mercy from the master of the realm he finds himself in, weaker by the day, as if time passes in this place, as if there are days to waste away by, resentment bubbling up like bile and bile bubbling up like resentment, cursing the name of Mordechai Lukas and his family, and of Robert Smirke’s horrible, twisted design throughout this miserable city, and of Jonah, and of Jonah, and of Jonah.

Jonah breathes it all in deeply, a lifetime of experiences neatly compartmentalizing itself into an easy shape for him to process, and he gently, gingerly picks up the skull of Barnabas Bennett, holding it with the tenderness of a lover against his chest, or perhaps with the satisfaction of a well-fed guest, before retrieving the rest of the bones (a meager amount, really: Barnabas was always such a small man) and starting on his way out. He has no doubts about whether or not Mordechai will release him from the Emptiness. He’s fairly certain that the threat of further confrontation is still enough of a deterrent.

His coach-driver is well trained (or perhaps just well paid) to not ask too many prying questions, and so he offers no surprise as Jonah puts his precious cargo into the prepared box, letting his hands linger on the varnished surface. It’s all a farce, of course, he thinks fondly. Barnabas will never have a funeral. Nobody would come, anyways: the Lonely hardly picked him out as an easy victim by pure chance. No, these bones will stay with Jonah, where they belong, especially while he can study them with all of his tools, gleaning whatever information he can. There is still marrow, after all. 

Jonah instructs his driver to take them back to the Magnus Institute at a slow pace, even as he closes his eyes in solemn peace, drafting the first stages of a statement.

**Author's Note:**

> i haven’t posted fic since [checks calendar] june ‘17 but i listened to all of tma and it haunted me and cursed me. i can’t believe the first thing i wrote is proto-lonelyeyes but Oh Well!
> 
> tumblr is edwinburroughs. you can send me suggestions and i’m happy to talk about them but given that on average i post once every two years we’ll see how that goes


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